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“SaltSister” is at a crossroads, friends. After more than four years I have weighed its accomplishments, the things it might yet accomplish, the cost in personal time, and whether the good done herein has been enough to justify the blog’s existence. With all that said, something tells me the blog accomplished whatever it was meant to accomplish in the grand scheme of things.

A part of me doesn’t ever want this blog to go away. Another part of me needs to be free to focus on other things. All I ever wanted to be was a writer–I sure never expected to take on the whole kingdom of God in a blog.

I have had many different jobs over the years to support my habit of doing what I liked–learning, creating, and writing. I could have worked my way up through a normal chain of publications (which is nearly what I did), but one day after a college instructor assured me that I had chosen the right field in feature journalism, I realized I was bored. The world had nothing to say that had not been said before.  I wanted to know what was on the backside of the universe. Before long I was in pursuit of a life rather than a career, and I’m happy to say that I found what I sought. 

While this blog may not have attracted a wide circle of polished writers (something that would have delighted my soul), it has surely attracted some deeply spiritual thinkers. Abhorrent to me was the thought of a life spent in public relations making the mediocre sound great or writing a weekly column about nothing and finding, at the end of it all, that I never said anything worth saying. Even worse was the thought that I might end up with nothing but the same empty, open hole in my heart that I started with. I devoted my time to asking the questions that no one else seemed to be asking. Those who responded with sincere probes have made me a better thinker and writer.

Herein I will share a few lessons that benefited me from the years of writing this blog.

“God is Just”

I recently gained a revelation of what I had only heard before–that ”God is just”. If I never find satisfaction in anything else, let it be this:

Justice and judgment [are] the habitation of thy throne: mercy and truth shall go before thy face. (Psalm 89:14)

It is hard to picture how God can be both just and merciful. My mother used to say  that we don’t want God’s justice; we want His mercy. Like so many, she saw justice and mercy as antithetical to one another. However, they are not.

To be sure, we are told that we deserve God’s wrath and therefore, we wouldn’t want His justice. This is undoubtedly true while we are in a state of unforgiveness, and therefore we ask Him for mercy. We deserve justice (in this case, wrath), but we ask for mercy because we cannot deliver ourselves from our sorry state.  Once we repent, it would be unjust of God not to give us mercy, for it was He who paid the price for our freedom. It would be unjust to Himself not to receive the benefits that He paid for.

Because the world contains so much evil, God’s justice, even when it involves wrath, is merciful. It stops the wholesale destruction of that which is innocent, pure, beautiful, and right. Justice is a mercy to victims of evil. By the same token, God’s mercy is also just for the repentant, no matter how evil they have been. After all, they are no less trapped in their fallenness than the rest of us though they may strike us as more evil.

Why Some Believe But Others Do Not

Is it not a mystery, though, why some believe  and repent but others do not? One day I was thinking of all the people I’ve known who told me why they believe or don’t believe in God and His Son Jesus Christ–and suddenly I realized they had the same reasons but with two different conclusions!  It was then I knew that what becomes of us has nothing to do with our circumstances of life, fortune, or misfortune. Our reasons arise from ourselves–not from our circumstances. From that moment, I knew how just God truly is.

I used to think that if I had prayed enough for so-and-so, they surely would have repented long ago. Or perhaps if I had been filled more with the Spirit of Christ, things would have been different. I would have been a better witness for God. When I realized that ”God is just”, it stopped the endless questioning of my methods, my motives, and the sufficiency of my dedication. There is no essential difference in the reasons given as to why some believe and others don’t. This is more evidence that the rain really does fall on the just and the unjust. All persons have a sovereign will. It belongs to themselves–not to God, nor to the person who presents the Gospel, and not to those who get blamed for giving God a bad name.

Here is a sampling of reasons for why some don’t believe in God or Christ:

1. There is unbelievable suffering in the world.

2. Science has new, improved answers.

3. God cannot be seen.

4. Someone abused them as children.

5. There was no one to present the Gospel.

Here are some reasons people give for believing:

1. There is unbelievable suffering in the world.

2. Science has new, improved answers.

3. God cannot be seen.

4. Someone abused them as children.

5. There was no one to present the Gospel.

Wait! We are all familiar with the first list, but why does it sound so much like the second? What about when all those first reasons are stood on their heads? What about the person who cries out to God and finds Him because of personal suffering? What about the one who receives an answer that science either can’t explain or for whom science’s new, improved answers are simply not enough? What about the one who “feels” the God he cannot see and determines to find Him? What about the one from a home where all the siblings were horribly abused, who alone escapes the vicious cycle of abuse? (Don’t laugh, this has really happened.) What about those ready to receive the Gospel before anyone was there to tell the story of Jesus? Why do they believe what they have not yet heard and others who have heard over and over do not?

That’s when I realized the difference was not in the conditions, experiences, or presentations of a story, but in the hearers themselves. Those who seek the Lord with all the heart will find Him. We already know which we are somewhere within and we carry our judgment within ourselves.

For it is written, [As] I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.
So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God.
(Rom. 14:11-12)

Do you see? We will not have to wait while God’s henchmen dredge up some convoluted case against us (that is Satan’s job anyway). Our own hearts will judge clearly on the side of God when the books are opened. We will see ourselves as we truly are. God’s providential will has been carried out daily since the world was set in place, and ours has always been the free choice to enter into that Providence or not.

The “Real Church”

Along the course of writing this blog, I also searched out many, many avenues concerning “fellowship” and the “real church”.  I found that many groups have maintained certain beautiful jewels of the faith through the centuries, but in the end I did not join any of them. Nor did I start a house church, which would have been the next logical step, given where I started. I have seen nothing new coming out of that sector–mostly they seem like the same old evangelical groups they left  or the strange, cultish groups that run swiftly after apostasies.

Perhaps the most important thing I gleaned about “church” and “gatherings” is that Jesus did not promise that if we gathered in groups He would meet us there. What He said is, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them (Mat. 18:20).” He said this without qualification as to intentionality of meeting.

They are two or three believers gathered unto Him [See Gen. 49:10b], not unto the meeting, the “church home”, the ministry, the Great Commission, the service to the poor… They are gathered unto Him. They are not seeking Him because they got together; they are together because they are seeking Him.

I thought once that if I could find the right-minded group of people to get together with, surely God would show up. Instead I found that if I pray, He will bring the one or two I need to walk with. There is no condition that these one or two continue together for ten years or for ten minutes. All I know is that He seems to give me one or two at the right moment. If you begin as “one”, it only takes one more to have “two gathered in His name”. If you have two, a third gives you a stronger witness when there is a matter to be taken up with God.

If “gathering together unto Him” takes place in a company of 15 neighbors who love to gather intentionally, so be it. But what if it’s not the same for all? I put the prayer ahead of the gathering and it seems to have stopped the crazy winds of doctrine that used to blow through my house.

Sadly, doctrines of demons so easily pervert entire house churches internationally. House churches, particularly the Chinese house church, have been held up to me as superior to anything going on in the Western World. A closer look has made me reject the idea of one-model-fits-all in the world of how-to-meet.

I have not found one national group of house churches to be superior to another because of intense suffering in the land. I find that all lands and peoples have different trials–some trials come from prosperity just as they do from adversity! If truth be told, I have found arrogance among all the streams of house church, including those one would expect to be humbled by suffering. But would you believe–some are lifted up and proud of their suffering? The same tendency to excess runs everywhere. All individuals and groups have their own challenges and not another’s; all must overcome in their own circumstances.

 End-Time Prophecies

Here is another area where a little light has brought in much freedom. The other night someone sent me to one of those sites where the presenter has “followed end-time prophecies for 40 years”. I grew up in evangelical circles where such things were discussed regularly and some became completely captivated trying to figure out how the last days unfold.

When someone has poured over scriptures, legends, and rumors all tying end-time prophecies together, it’s extremely difficult to make heads or tails of the mind of God any more. I ran across such a person who said his mission was to warn people of the 100 million super soldier giants (nephilim) who will be released upon the earth again. I couldn’t help wondering what we are supposed to be “warned” about if there’s nothing we can do about it anyway? I never heard a solution offered. And besides–whether it’s army tanks, nuclear fallout, or mass murder–dead is dead. Will we be any deader at the hands of nephilim than if we die alone in our little beds of some quiet disease?

Many months ago, a very sincere reader sent me several disks about conspiracy theories involving the World Trade Center and the Freemasons. The information is seductive and fascinating. I have no doubt many of the things purported therein are true. I am positive that the Illuminati is real, the Grand Orient Lodge is real, some Freemasons are the Devil, and that Washington, D.C.’s streets and buildings were modeled after some secret fraternal symbols. But all of that will lead absolutely nowhere.

For those who want to “take this country back”, that will seem like very important data to have on hand, but it’s not. The fact is, the national identity has been buoyed up by a religious and political mythology of incompatible elements all along. The Pilgrims weren’t founding a great nation; they were founding a colony. Most newcomers to America were nominal Christians at least, but the real founder of the American economic system was the East India Trading Co., that New World Order enterprise that almost succeeded in keeping the colonies strapped as the slaves of the British Empire (but which succeeded in getting its tentacles into the new American system instead and corrupting it beyond all belief).

What are we to make of this–? That there is a vast conspiracy or that there is no conspiracy whatsoever? The truth lies elsewhere, I believe. There are many conspiracies of various sizes throughout the world, and none has ever had such forethought as to deliberately and knowingly create an anti-Christ system for the purpose of meeting Jesus Christ in a showdown at Armageddon. Many elements of the anti-Christ system actually began with the best of intentions. But whether intentional or haphazard, the ultimate exaltation of mankind’s interests and comfort in place of God’s position of judgment has always resulted in a world at odds with its Creator. It would not take a mass conspiracy to reach the zenith of “Mankind as God” or “666″, which we are now seeing. All it takes is individual evil or individual humanized “good” in place of God and it all plays into the same hand. The outcome doesn’t require a conspiracy of megaproportions. By nature, everything based on Mankind as the ultimate arbiter of what is good and desirable, pits itself against all that is God.

Therefore, ignore these conspiracy interests, which take an inordinate amount of time away from the pursuit of God’s interests. They are distractions designed to make you miss the mark. Those who lead others with their knowledge of conspiracy theories and end-time prophecies operate out of their darkened natural mind. They will miss the speaking of the Lord to His people.

A Better Way

With that said, let me direct you to a better way of approaching those things that are spiritually understood. A friend sent me to T. Austin-Sparks’ series on “Discipleship in the School of Christ“. For some weeks I had been hovering around the teachings of Austin-Sparks, certain I was looking for something but with no idea what. (Are we just dense at certain times?) When I went to the link, I realized I had found exactly what had been weighing on my heart for weeks. Austin-Sparks describes what it means to learn of Christ–that Christ is the substance of everything we receive from Him whether it be an inward realization or a an outward manifestation of power. I believe that Austin-Sparks was absolutely on the mark  in this complete apprehension of Christ.

This is something I have felt and could not put into words. I knew that I knew that I knew that I was onto something–that God could ultimately be trusted with the outcome of my life if I would let go of all controls. It was as if I were being invited to jump into a stream of life with both feet and never again worry about the details–whether I had “fellowship” or not, whether I was in a “house church” or a “gathering”, whether I had all the nuts and bolts screwed down. I knew I could trust this Christ!

Of course, there are always the nay-sayers who say, “You might get ‘off’!” But tell me how anyone could get “off” in the hands of Christ! The problem is that the nay-sayers have been “off” for 2000 years because they have captured the entire operation into the hands of humans under the banner of “accountability” — an anti-Christ notion — if ever there was one — that God needs humans to keep His things on track.

A Time to Decrease

I tried so hard these past four years to ask the hard questions and to share the things I thought were so exciting. One day I wondered what I was doing any more. If a person truly grasps some of the deeper things in “SaltSister”, there is every reason to question whether they even need me to write it down. If they can grasp the best things therein, they can grasp better things by going directly to the Source, which is Christ Himself.

I struggled with whether I had any business continuing the blog. What is to be gained thereby? Shall we preserve certain, pet teachings for posterity? However true they may be, they are not understood properly by the intellect. We then have a case of trying to teach spiritual things to people’s minds. Better yet, the writings may serve as a second witness for things that God is already doing in someone. This is the one learning to “buy oil” from Christ directly. The second witness may be for the purpose of giving them confidence that what they are buying from Him is real oil. 

Therefore, I suppose I should not regret writing “SaltSister”, though it often left me feeling more exposed than I liked. It has served its purpose as the “second witness”. I wonder what will happen after this? Perhaps ”SaltSister” will be around longer than anyone knows. Maybe its lessons will continue to unfold in silence while I go about the business of picking up life as a regular person. God knows. But we are traveling this road together, right?

I thank God for this article by Paul Proctor: “Is Christianity All About Relationships?” Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. Proctor for bringing that out. I wish someone had written this as a letter to the churches about ten or fifteen years ago, because, frankly, I am tired of being batted all over the place like a ping-pong ball over the issue of love vs. truth.

What doesn’t today’s so-called church understand about these verses?:

Can two walk together, except they be agreed? (Amos 3:3)

Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? (2 Cor. 6:14)

Did not Jesus say this discipleship would cost us something? (Luke 14:28) Did He not say, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26) Yet how did human relationships alone come to trump the truth? Are our proper relationships in our humanity or in Christ?

Here are some wise words from a friend on the topic of “house church hucksters” and the things they are foisting off on those who have left the institutions. One of these is the common man-made doctrine that everything is about relationships — even to the detriment of living out the truth:

“I just read Paul Proctor’s article. The same thing has been going through my mind and I have intended to write about it. I have not because my business has been taking up my time. But here are a few thoughts on the topic.

“For one thing, everyone is in a relationship with God. Of course, not everyone is in covenant with the Lord, but everyone has a relationship. Consider Romans 14:

Rom 14:6-8

6 He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord; and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth not regard it. He that eateth, eateth to the Lord, for he giveth God thanks; and he that eateth not, to the Lord he eateth not, and giveth God thanks.
7 For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.
8 For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s. (KJV)

“I know that Paul is talking about how Christians are regarding the Lord but the truth be told, the lost do what they do according to how they relate to God. To deny God is a type of relationship. What is meant, of course, is a cooperative relationship with God. But the term is thrown about loosely.

“Second, the expression ‘relationship’ is used as a cover to prevent people from speaking into your life. How often have I heard people say that you can’t speak into someone’s life unless you already have a relationship. That is such a crock. The truth is, most people, because of their relationship, will not speak the truth to them. It is more readily done by the stranger who doesn’t care. The Old Testament prophets did not cultivate an agreeable relationship with the kings of Israel. They did not care. They spoke the truth whenever Yahweh commanded them to do so.

“Proctor is right. We do not worship the redeemed but the Redeemer. And, frankly, … house church hucksters are in a better position to control people and prevent them from speaking the truth because they define what it means to be in a ‘relationship’.”

A friend published another friend’s letter on a forum today. I wanted to quote some pertinent things from it here and share my response. Too many are torn up over the state of the church in the West today and I’d like to offer another perspective on the matter that may give some hope.

The letter opens with the need for repentance in the Body of Christ in America, a fearful judgment, and a call for “repentance, prayer and the reestablishment of the Kingdom of God through brokenness and a total dependency on Him….” He continues:

Years ago we were hearing the call to repentance, as usual we pushed it aside for our great plans. The call to repentance is going to get stronger as we draw closer to judgment and men and their answers are going to continue as usual. It matters little how important they think they are and how important it is for them to come together. A kingdom divided by the efforts of men is coming down and God will finally speak through His anointed men with the anointing of the power of the Holy Spirit and not through the men with the answers. Often such leaders meet to establish their place in the body of Christ, when the meetings are over the conditions for God’s judgment will still be there because they cannot descern the Lambs body.

What God is attempting to do right now is being hindered more by those who have included themselves as leaders than all of His adversaries, this is because they are damaging the body from within. … Self appointed leaders who are constantly scrambling to the top are feeding into it the mind of man and not the brokenness of spirit.

I remember one day talking to a few of those leaders and we were talking about the unity of the body, they got irritated and said, “where do we begin and how do we know who to include.” a good question for ones seeking to side step the issue of unity and its implication to their ministries. God is blinding eyes and hardening hearts that have taken charge and are running on their own revelations.

We have a ton of answers and yet not an once of power. If all God was waiting for was our better understanding of the operation of things, the kingdom would have been established a long time ago. God builds from life from those truly seated in heavenly places, those who set their minds on things above and have totally died to all of self. Because we lack Life, in God’s jealousy He is sending judgment. the only thing that will stop it is humility and repentance for what we have all done to His body. Each man will one day stand before the Head and the KIng… there will be one question that they will have to answer, “What did you do with My body, its unity and my cross?”. …

There are people like me all over the world (nobody’s) who weep every day for the restoration of the glory of HIs body. …

I remember once feeling exactly as he feels. However, I have since changed my mind. My response was:

…I want to examine some of the assumptions made in his article and see if we can’t come to what I believe is a more balanced way to look at these things. They certainly have a way of disturbing our peace and putting us into bondage worrying about fixing a lot of people.

[name omitted] *____* mentions the “reestablishment of the Kingdom of God”. Two things come to mind. 1) the Kingdom of God has no end and its foundations will never be moved–therefore, why does it need to be re-established? 2) Perhaps he means it needs to be pre-eminent again on the North American continent because those who carried the banner have now died out. Don’t know… but if he has in mind a mass of people — what mass of people might that be? Is it the whole of North America, the masses of organizations that call themselves churches, the masses of people who call themselves Christians, the influence of right/wrong upon the temporal government of the United States and the North American culture? This needs to be established before I know what to agree or disagree with.

I think I “feel” what he’s driving at, though, because it’s the way I was taught to feel. And I have come to believe that such a “feeling” is off-base now. I believe it comes from a mindset of identifying certain groups and people movements as “church” and wanting God to straighten them out. But I really believe we need to drop this mindset as it ties us into relations with people the Lord may not have chosen for whatever we think He must have in mind. We want them to “get” whatever we think we now have. We want them to enter in to something because we have our affections trained on them in some capacity. All of this needs to go the way of the Cross.

Secondly, we have an idea that the early church was THE model church and that they were all one in the spirit and in unity, etc., etc. The entirety of the New Testament shows us that this simply is not so. The legalism of the Galatians and the debauchery and the “orgiastic” pursuit of gifts among the Corinthians show this was not so. In other places we are told of those who loved the present world and had left the fellowship of the saints and of those who drew people after themselves. There is only one account I can think of where the spirit in the church struck someone dead–in the account of Ananias and Sapphira. Thereafter, we don’t read about that. So, this was an immature church in Jerusalem where we are first told they had all things in common and there was the unity of the spirit.

Let us look anew to the speaking of the Lord for our own day and not try to infuse the kingdoms of this world with the spirit of Christ in attempts to prop up the old order. Let’s also consider everything we’ve ever done with regard to denominations, ministries, house churches, etc., as yet more of the old order that does not need to be propped up by the KOG. Instead, let’s reckon that the KOG smashes everything in its path and sets itself up in their stead.

Let’s look at the watchword someone gave me last night: “God is just.” It seems we ought to run from the judgment of God. We ought to warn everyone and help them get out of judgment’s path… But I submit to you that the judgment of God is very, very good. It is not to dispense death but to dispense life. Death doesn’t need dispensing; it is already everywhere. It is the last enemy of God to be judged in Revelation.

God is just and knows the hearts of all. We do not. This word came to me after a lifetime of handwringing over other people’s lives and fearing the judgment of God upon them. God is not going to mete out anything to anyone that isn’t fair. That means that if people are simply ignorant of God through no fault of their own, He is not going to judge them as if they had perfect understanding and simply rejected Him. That means that if people failed Him over and over while humbly asking His pardon, He is not going to judge them along with willful reprobates.

Judgment is not only about the hills melting like wax, but it is also about God wiping away all tears from the eyes of His people. We know that His ultimate intention is to subsume everything and to show forth Himself to the principalities and powers out of His people. (2 Thess. 1:10 and Eph. 3:9-10). So, let us hesitate before filling people with fears and bondage about re-establishing God’s kingdom. There’s no rest in that, but only works (unless of course, God has given YOU a specific word on that–I don’t believe it’s a generic word to the Body).

The Lord’s Body is already full of glory–people have just been focusing on the wrong things and don’t notice. Here’s a post [elsewhere] … on the topic.

Let’s get our focus straight so that we can have the right perspective regarding these very legitimate things that *__* brings up. To talk about the Cross is very, very good. To remain at the Cross is to concentrate on the wrong thing. Everything of the self must die at the Cross — yes. But we are participants in a life that proceeds out of that death and that is why the Lord deems us to be “new creatures”. If we are spiritual, we should operate out of the New Creation and quit trying to dress up the old — even when it wears the banner of Christianity over it. Every thing in us should begin to operate out of the mind of Christ, which saturates us as Christ is formed in us and as we are brought in more fully into the new creation. This is not something we can will ourselves into, but as the Lord gives us discernment, we can enter into it more fully here and there.

I speak in this manner, because the issue that *__* brings up — while it’s a good start — is also something I have begun to leave behind. I don’t know what will come of what has been called the “Church” in North America. It doesn’t matter. We can pray for people and we can talk to them about the Cross and resurrection life (and we should), but the choice is theirs. It does not affect us ultimately if we remain in the life of the Body. It simply makes our temporal lives more difficult in some ways. But we still have the choice to go on, with or without others (and we should choose to do so). God will deal with others as He sees fit, but we must pray and live out Christ.

I have become quite aware lately that I am looking over the cusp between what WAS the Church Age and what is coming upon us as the saturating age of the Kingdom. (Please don’t take the term “age” too strictly here, as there is no time in eternity, but we are seeing something played out here.) The world has been evangelized already (for all practical purposes) and has mostly rejected the Gospel. In a few places, evangelization is still necessary, but on the streets of America a lot of the homeless can preach it better than I can.

What has not happened is that people have not gone on to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. I can tell you about this but I cannot show it to you. This is something that MUST be revealed by the Lord Himself to you. You cannot teach it, preach it, demonstrate it. The blind will not see. Pray that the Lord will open eyes. This is the way to go and I’m going. The Lord has been gracious enough to begin to bring people across my path who are beginning to see this, too, and I’m watching the Body begin to come together in some small unity while others are still talking about the state of things in the temporal expression. I have already “come out of her” and am taking the high road into the life of Christ.

I hope this helps someone. It’s not a big panic thing if you see what the Lord is doing. All these things coming upon the earth are necessary to bring His plan about. Stay in Him. Hide in Him. Do not participate in the outrage that many have devoted themselves to in fear. The evil is simply the way of the world and we have no part in that if we belong to Him. He is able to lead us in the way we should go. He is able also to separate the chaff from the wheat. Watch and pray.

I was silently broken-hearted when I went to get a sandwich at the campus deli. “Life is just a damned vail of tears!” I told the Lord. I ordered my sandwich at the counter, let the words of my own heart sink in, and by the time I left with the sandwich, I remembered a scripture: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.” (2 Cor. 4:7)

How very odd. The God of the universe in our hearts surrounded by our fallen flesh! I remembered a lesson from another time: God is no less God in us for all our infirmities and frailness. Why does He allow disaster in our lives when we know Him already and have turned from evil that His life and goodness may take root in our hearts?

I used to imagine that one day I would have a heart so pure as to make evil obsolete as the means of my transformation. I never thought about evil touching those I care for, though. All about me are those who still need to come to the end of themselves and it kills my soul to watch. “Why this death?” I asked Him.

I called a friend this evening. We both know several people who should be at the end of their ropes but apparently are not. They have created miserable circumstances for themselves and it is difficult not to fear for their safety. My friend asked me, “Why?” I told him I had considered it and realized that some people need destruction — that it is actually the mercy of God in many cases. It is the only way some people will ever call out to God — when they realize that they aren’t powerful enough to ignore the principles of the universe. Consequences, though, are like a double-edged sword. Not only does it cut through the heart of the rebellious ones — it cuts through the heart of the faithful ones who still trust in their own abilities — abilities to fix things, to convince others to “fly right”, and to demand from God the change needed. We, also, come to the end of ourselves and cry out for deliverance.

Prayer takes many forms in my life. Sometimes I pray on beads — because I need them? No. But it’s like in the movies where a woman goes into labor and the doctor or midwife tells someone, “Boil water!” It keeps them out of the way while the drama unfolds. Other times, I don’t care about beads, candles, or anything. I just need to talk to God. Then there are those times that leave me weeping convulsively on the floor. I doubt that any of these methods is better or worse than another. Those are more for us than for God who looks at the heart. But, as humans, we have to do something with ourselves.

I drove home in the evening dusk. I asked Him, “God, how can I really know you? I need to hear you. What does it take to be open to hear Your voice?” I thought about how Jesus experienced the full onslaught of fallen judgment against His divinity. He has already walked this way. Now the spirit of Christ has been released and made available to those who choose Him. Divinity is still walking around in human skin. He knows what it is to be single and lonely, what it is to be married and miserable. He understands the way of a parent with a child and a child with a parent; He knows what it is to be master and slave. He still subjects Himself to the elements of the world until the entirety of the cosmos is subsumed in His kingdom at last. Just as He overcame the world the first time, He still overcomes it today — in our lives.

I remember the quiet moments I used to have with my mother. When I was a little girl we used to sing together. I listened to her talk about the things she valued and believed in — about what was good and just and noble. It affected my outlook profoundly. Even when she said nothing, it didn’t matter. I knew what she thought and what she felt. All it took was a look from her and I knew what she thought about something.

God is like that. That’s what it takes to know Him. Conversations, quiet times, a look, a glance. I spent a lot of my early spiritual life trying to consciously think on Him every spare moment for fear I might lose contact or miss something spiritual. Suddenly today I remembered my mother — a mere human being. It sure wasn’t that hard to know what my mother thought, and I didn’t think on her every minute of the day. Half the time I didn’t think of her at all, but I knew she was there if I needed her. Sometimes she sat me down for a “talking to” and I didn’t want to listen, but I learned to sit still.

It’s the same with God. It doesn’t take staring at Him across the table all day long to know Him. He is fully “family” to those who believe. He is our Father. It only takes a few words here and there and a little conversation each day to know Him. I saw that it’s the same for me when I involve Him in my concerns just like I used to talk to my mother about what I loved, what I hated and what made me sad.

Of course He knows… My mother always did and she was a finite woman. How much more the God of the universe who travels around in our flesh?

Just as important, I see that the “vail of tears” is like an ocean that we travel through, always there no matter how righteous or wicked we are. Sometimes we find elements of beauty in spite of it, but the tears are always there, in our hearts if not our eyes. They may be recently past or shortly up ahead, but they are always waiting. In the end, it doesn’t matter what we feel, for it makes God in us no less God at all. But the one who lets the two-edged sword of anguish cut through the flesh to reveal Christ within is the one who overcomes the world in this lifetime.

When I speak of organic church and organic ministries, I am not speaking about house churches. Instead I speak about the organic life of God Himself flowing through His body on Earth wherever His body may be. So that can be in house churches, or it can be in the professional clergy system, or it can be on the job, in school, in the family, or anywhere. In short, everywhere. [Alexander Douglas, "Organic Church", freethechurch.org]

What a wonderful quote from the Free the Church site. Soon afterwards, I went into deep thought and ended up writing my reflections below to a mutual friend.

Dear T–

You write a lot about the Kingdom of God and others write a lot about house churches. So my friend was talking about the heavy emphasis on some sites we’ve been on that have an emphasis on the church. He brought up some valid issues, I think. One of those is that neither he nor I really know what house churches are teaching. We hear a lot about the state of the I/Cs, but then when we go to these forums, we meet these people in house churches and what comes out of their keyboards is insanity. What he said is this:

On [Forum X] we only seem to hear from people who have some form of ministry themselves and from leaders like K–. I don’t recall hearing from people on the receiving end. On [Forum Y] it was a free for all and we’d hear from people who aren’t leaders but who were very sure of themselves and very vocal, and way off track. The discussions I was in on were mainly about refuting doctrinal assertions, not about maturity and spiritual reality.

.
His next remarks came from something I wrote once about how “church” didn’t happen by “getting a bunch of people together”. … That is the thinking — that we have to “get a bunch of people together” or “church” isn’t really “church” — not even in house church. And so many of these groups, we suspect are meeting just to meet.

Isn’t the spiritual quality of the group or the gathering a matter of the measure of Christ that is being expressed? Doesn’t that increase less by gifting than by the cross working in an individual whereby they are permanently transformed?

This doesn’t just come about by getting people together, whether they are “centered on Jesus” or not. I’m not really sure what they mean by being centered on Jesus or in love with Jesus anyway. Being “in love”, in our vernacular, comes from feelings of strong affection and admiration for a member of the opposite sex. It’s not an expression I recall any place in the NT, nor even a sentiment expressed in other terms. There is a cultural history to the whole idea. …

So I don’t really know what they mean by it, as applied to life in Christ. Is this a perpetual feeling people have? [Frank] Viola has spoken about “A people who are consumed with God’s eternal passion, which is to make his Son preeminent, supreme, and the head over all things visible and invisible.” Is this about getting excited over the idea of this? I’m not sure at all how they say this plays out in real life or even church life. I’m not going to buy their books to find out.

What I’m not exactly hearing from these quarters is about the fact that God’s purposes come about through resurrection. It’s the resurrection life of Christ in us, which implies there has to have been a death.

Here’s something that I’m puzzling over. I’m not hearing a clarion word about Christ and the meaning of the Cross and about growing unto full stature. We hear about church planting, house church, being focused on Jesus, . . . But does this word of Christ as our life and the role of the Cross have anything to do with talking about the church? Is this the actual foundation that is being laid by those who are church planters, out from which the church is a natural and inevitable result? Or are we facing once again a de facto clergy system, in effect, where there are leaders who remain the leaders and there are followers who remain followers of the leaders?

One thing I seem to see this morning is that one attains leader status by writing books. If you don’t write a book then, no matter what you have to say or how much light you may have, you can’t get a word in with the leaders who write books and their groups. Whether they are humble about it or otherwise, the leaders are the authorities and if you come in with a different emphasis that what they are teaching they will basically dismiss you.

This reminds me that I heard a church planter say that in America there are four or five streams of house church and he fears they are becoming house church denominations. I hear a lot of good from their vocal leaders, but then hear so much junk coming from the practitioners of this method of meeting. It’s like they have a floating foundation — just like everything else in the world these days.

Meanwhile, my friend and I have been talking just between ourselves, lifting things up to God…and lo and behold, there is no confusion, backbiting, dissension, vying for leadership… We think that two or three also constitutes a “church” of some sort since Jesus is in the midst of even two or three. Neither of us had been led into a “house church” as yet. …

Anyway, I haven’t answered my friend appropriately yet because I was so struck by what he said that I needed to mull it over more. But then shortly after this I started thinking about the questions we seem to have most difficulty getting answered and how Jesus, as a man walking this earth, didn’t seem to struggle with this stuff. He pulled up the most amazing answers to things out of the blue. It was then that I wrote a post on my blog called “The Mind of Jesus“, which cracked open an entire new realm of understanding for me.

I began to understand a little more about how Jesus could pull up the answers to difficult questions that He did. After I finished writing “The Mind of Jesus“, I was driving home musing on it all, and realized that a person could see everything in the world different if they could only apprehend how Jesus derived His thoughts. It was only a glimmer then, but after I got home I realized that something had been cracked open to me about the culture wars and our role in society out of all this. I wound up writing “Fishing for the Answer” immediately after. Suddenly, everything began to make sense. I don’t have all answers to everything yet, but I see that there is a better way to approach all questions of life than in the debates.

The result for me at the moment is that I have many questions now that I want to understand through the mind of Christ. In past, I would simply raise questions to God and wait and raise them again and again. I wonder now if part of my lack of discernment may have been that I didn’t fully understand what it meant to have the mind of Christ. Nobody teaches you what that’s like. They just assume you have it.

So far, I seem to be on the right track and I trust that God will keep me there. A lot of what I thought and believed two years ago, I’ve throw overboard. Hard to believe so much could change in a short space.

See you later,
Kathryn